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[quote=Anonymous]I have a very unique and controversial approach to most things technology. By the time I consider my child ready for her own laptop, I do not monitor very closely.

All computers or Wi-Fi enabled devices that will be in our home long term have to be on our home Wi-Fi network, and we use OpenDNS filtering to block pornographic content across the entire network. Nobody in our house needs to run into that kind of stuff online, so we set the filtering from the router so that no computer on our network will access such sites, accidentally or otherwise. Attempts to do so would be recorded in an access log so that we could see and address that happening. For antivirus we use AVG Protection, and we can manage the antivirus on all devices added to our network. All files downloaded on any device on our network are logged, so we can see what is causing the problem if something has given our computer a virus. Other than that, I do not further monitor once they’re in high school and we have decided they are responsible enough for their own laptop. Until they are self-supporting, we tell them that we retain the right to check the contents or activity logs/internet history of their computers, but in practice we would only do this if we had serious reason to believe there was a major problem such as a crime or a risk to someone’s physical or emotional safety. That has never happened and hopefully never will.

In order to get to that point, however, we treat use of the internet like a serious responsibility and prepare for independent use in much the same way we prepare our teens to get their driver’s license. In order to gain adult-level trust and unmonitored internet access by high school my child will have had many years of closely monitored use of everything online except social media. We start very young and slowly back off the strict supervision as they demonstrate responsible use; the last year before we intend to allow unmonitored access we do a trial run where we do not monitor in real time but instead log all online activity and spot check on a random basis to ensure responsible usage habits. They will have had one year of very closely monitored social media use, and depending on how responsible they have been with that, we may choose to continue monitoring social media when they are given their own computer or we may decide they can be trusted to use it with only random spot checks for another year before phasing out even those. The final requirement to get the pretty much unmonitored access to the internet (other than the virus and obscenity blocking that is on everyone’s computer even DH’s and mine) is a major project about computer network security, internet safety, and prudent online behavior. This has a rubric and written requirements, and it has to actually be completed and presented to DH and I, otherwise we keep a “young teen” level of parental controls on their computer that does enable us to closely monitor and/or restrict internet access.

If we find out there is some sort of problem with their online behavior, if they ever make an unauthorized attempt to alter our network security, or if it seems that monitoring their own internet access is causing them problems in other areas of life, the high level of trust is revoked and we go back to using a fairly restrictive suite of parental control software. That happened to one kid for one school quarter, and the problem has never been repeated.
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